Tuesday 25 December 2012

A Christmas Eve Review of The Hobbit For Your Edification

Amongst meeting family and friends I managed to fit in about 37 years to sit down and watch The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey today. Fuck me, that was long. I'm not sure in what universe Peter Jackson is living in if he thinks he needs 9 hours to tell this story - other than "MGM has been in bankruptcy proceedings-verse" - but financial returns are a reason to have 3 films, not to make them 3 hours each. This could quite easily have been 100 minutes long and been leaner, faster, and better.

This ties into my main criticism of the film, which I would say is probably in the 2-3 star range: Jackson is a good director who totally gets the look of Middle Earth, but not a natural story-teller who understands its tone. There was far too much exposition going on, so much so that it utterly swamped the story. Tolkien didn't see the need to detail the backstory of the dwarves at the beginning of The Hobbit, nor to explain who the Necromancer was, nor the history of the descendants of Thrain and their battles with the orcs; some of it he introduced in snippets through the story, some of it comes in exposition (but crucially, only once we are rolling along with the story and we already know and love the characters), and some of it remains unsaid. It's because he understood this was a story for children and such stories need to be entertaining and to cut to the chase. And I don't think anybody in the world has ever read that book and said "Christ, I can't understand what's going on here - this thing needs more info dump!"

Oddly, I think Jackson can learn a lot from pre-prequels George Lucas. When Lucas was penning the script for Star Wars: A New Hope, he well understood that backstory and exposition would get in the way of what he wanted to achieve: a pacey, exciting movie. He gives you all the information you need in the first 30 seconds, then just barrels along without stopping to tell you who Darth Vader is, what the Empire is doing and how long they have been around, what the Senate is, all that jazz. (You can't trust much of what George Lucas says, but he attributes this willingness to forego exposition to watching Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece The Hidden Fortress; watching 1950s Japanese cinema as a Westerner, you don't have much of a clue of the background to what you are seeing, but it doesn't matter a jot in terms of the story. George Lucas learnt that lesson, although oddly he somehow unlearned it later on, along with how to make an entertaining flick.)

I have other complaints - chief among them being the total lack of understatement, but that is probably a matter of taste; for me, one of the great pleasures of Tolkien's writing is that he doesn't go for the grandiose very often - only when it matters. The Hobbit is a delightfully understated book. It is only when you meet Smaug that it turns into an epic, and that makes Smaug seem genuinely epic. Peter Jackson starts with the epic at 11; there is nowhere you can go from here, and when every single moment of danger is met by one dwarf or another screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" (Jackson must have been the only person who watched Star Wars: Episode III and thought "That bit where Darth Vader stands up was awesome!"), when every single scene involves moody stares with a dramatic orchestral swell in the background, when every bad guy (except for the refreshing exception of the great goblin) bellows with exactly the same bassy rumble, when every climactic moment involves the dwarves getting yet another last-but-not-last-because-they'll-get-another-one-in-a-minute burst of energy... It all seems to merge together into one rather bland morass.

It looked pretty, and it was enjoyable on its own merits, but I feel like Peter Jackson and I simply like the exact opposite things when we look at Tolkien's work. Also, to those who have seen it, is it just me or do all the evil characters in the film have exactly the same face? The trolls, the orcs, and Gollum all seem to screw their visages up into precisely the same scowl the entire time. They need to get a new make-up guy in.  

14 comments:

  1. I quite agree.

    Aside from the bit about the make-up guy. I'm not sure they used traditional make-up this time around, as it all looked like cgi to me.

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    1. You're probably right, but seriously, if you watch it again, look at the faces of the trolls, Azog, the Great Goblin and Gollum. Their facial expressions are near-identical.

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    2. Oh that I'm not arguing with. I'm just saying we blame the cgi guy for that rather than the make-up guy.

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  2. You pretty much nail it here. PJ was going for, as you say, Epic turned up to 11. Hence the three three-hour movies and all the extraneous action scenes.

    Ever watch the commentary tracks on the Lord of the Rings DVDs? Jackson talked constantly about how this or that set-piece needed to, in his mind, "top what had come before." He was always trying to out-do himself with over the top action, and I think it continued into the Hobbit. By "There and Back Again" the action scenes will look like something from Tsui Hark.

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    1. Legolas is the most egregious example. He was tolerable in Fellowship, but when the Two Towers came along he was vaulting onto a moving horse and skateboarding down a staircase while firing arrows like a submachinegun, and by Return he was singlehandedly killing a mammoth. Every action scene involved increasingly idiotic stunts.

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  3. Also, Tolkien's book was actually about the Hobbit. Just as Tron (both versions) weren't about Tron, but rather about Flynn (which explains just about everything that's wrong with both movies, little as that may be), PJ is rewriting the story so that it is actually about Thorin.

    2 years hence this will explain just about everything that turns out to be wrong with the trilogy (and a great deal that will be).

    That, and the apparent fact that PJ wouldn't know how to portray an allusion or metaphor if the author tattooed the instructions on his ******* forehead.

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    1. That's a really good point, about Thorin. And it ties in with the need to be epic all the time. Thorin's story offers more opportunity for epic-ness, so that's who we focus on. It takes away Bilbo's role as the emotional heart of the tale (and reduces his transformation from zero to hero to a mere side-show he gets over before the story has even really begun).

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    2. Indeed. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings as an epic sequel to The Hobbit. Peter Jackson is filming The Hobbit as an epic prequel to The Lord of the Rings. The story wasn't written to support that.

      Ever since I saw it, I've been thinking about how much better Guillermo Del Toro's version would have been.

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    3. Me too. I feel like he would have "got it".

      Another complaint - which links to the "epic problem" - is the lack of humour or any sort of light touch. There are a few amusing moments, but the novel of The Hobbit is very comedic. The dwarves are idiots - dunderheaded, obstinate, incompetent, and foolish - and Bilbo is forever having to rescue them for no thanks or reward. The book is built on that, really; the whole point of the plot is that Bilbo is the only one out of the lot of them who has any common sense, which is why Gandalf picked him.

      I know why Peter Jackson went for the tone he did, but it seems a bit cowardly to me. I wish he'd been braver and stuck closer to the tone of the source material.

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    4. the movie aims at a very young audience, and from my 1 person sample i can say they hit their target quite well. my 12 year old nephew liked it a lot.

      i didn't. :(

      ps: i guess you don't know that a huge amount of the star wars "backstory" was retconned during the making of all the movies and george lucas had no idea who darth vader would turn out to be when doing star wars?

      http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/book.html

      great book, really recommended to everyone interested in star wars lore. :)

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    5. The same problem applies to the elves. Their portrayal, especially in the Hobbit, is entirely too heavy. In the book, the elves are rather silly, light-hearted and constantly singing goofy songs. That attitude carries over, to some degree, into the LOTR books.

      There is a place for this other-worldly-mysterious-ultra-serious stuff, but a little goes a long way. Tolkein's elves were much too old to constantly take themselves that seriously.

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  4. Arg, thanks for the info, I was hoping against hope that Jackson, who appears to have peaked with Heavenly Creatures (and/or Dead/Alive, depending on how you feel about gore), hadn't made such a complete hash of the Hobbit as he had of LotR. That's three hours saved, then.

    Shit, make that nine.

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  5. I think Alan Lee should get the credit for the look of Middle Earth in Jackson's films, given that he is the "conceptual designer" and that the bits that are good are the ones that look exactly like his paintings.

    http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0496769/

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  6. I have other complaints - chief among them being the total lack of understatement, but that is probably a matter of taste; for me, one of the great pleasures of Tolkien's writing is that he doesn't go for the grandiose very often - only when it matters. The Hobbit is a delightfully understated book. It is only when you meet Smaug that it turns into an epic, and that makes Smaug seem genuinely epic.

    Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The Jackson spectacle really doesn't fit this aspect of the book.

    That said, I think the parts of the Hobbit that were well done were very well done. The riddles in the dark scene and the prologue about the coming of Smaug I thought were both quite good. The piling of action on action really gets tiresome though.

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